International crew set for launch to space station Sunday

November 22, 2014 8:49 PM

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In clear but frigid weather, Russian engineers hauled a Soyuz rocket to the launch pad Friday, setting the stage for launch Sunday on a six-hour flight to ferry a veteran Russian cosmonaut, a NASA shuttle pilot and a European rookie to the International Space Station, boosting the lab’s crew back to six and kicking off a busy winter of research and assembly work.

Soyuz TMA-15M commander Anton Shkaplerov, flanked on the left by flight engineer Samantha Cristoforetti and on the right by NASA astronaut Terry Virts, are scheduled for liftoff from complex 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:01:14 p.m. EST Sunday (GMT-5; 3:01 a.m. Monday local time), ...